Liberating Latent Dooms

A while ago, it suddenly hit me that now that being an emperor/empress doesn't win the game, players could potentially become stuck in cycles with all territories destroyed and thus being forced to lose to get to the next game cycle. So because I care about you, I did the most sensible thing and added latent dooms to the game in order to cause everybody to succumb after a prolonged agony at the hands of an eldritch evil force in those cases.

From now on, right from the start of each cycle, you'll get a new message informing you of the presence of that cycle's chosen latent doom behind the phenomenon of Anamnesis. As with relics, units and territories, there will be a growing list of these dooms for the game to choose from for each cycle and new mechanics and features will very likely depend on them in the future.

With a bit of luck, you might be able to get through a cycle without these dooms causing any significant damage to you or the colony. Under normal circumstances you'll only get mild, mostly harmless and maybe even positive events between turns similar to those caused by other units or the relic. Maybe a person went missing, maybe a brief, faint tremor has been noticed at one point of the colony or something like that, no biggie.

These events will become more frequent as more territories are destroyed. After the second territory has been destroyed things won't look so harmless anymore and you'll start getting new, direr events, perhaps causing sinkholes to appear or unusual gigantic shapes to linger far in the horizon.

At a threshold that would vary between cycles from anywhere between 4 to 6 territories destroyed however, you'll probably find yourself in an irreversible vicious cycle with catastrophic events plaguing the colony and more and more territories being destroyed in a spiral of doom.

If all territories are destroyed, you'll be sent to the next cycle with a mutual defeat. These dooms will impact the future cycle like relics, though generally in a more negative and equally distributed manner. One important difference is that, unlike in defeats by capture, in these defeats by doom neither you nor your rival get the relic.


I'm sure you're familiar enough with the terms "scorched earth" and "greater good".